Windows Azure Faces European Downtime

(The Hosting News) – Downtime hit Microsoft’s key cloud platform Windows Azure in Europe early Thursday morning, according to a report from Data Center Knowledge. It’s the second time downtime has occurred this year, following a similar instance in February initially blamed on the “leap year” bug.

“We are experiencing an availability issue in the West Europe sub-region, which impacts access to hosted services in this region,” commented Microsoft via its Health Services Dashboard, according to the Data Center Knowledge news story.

The incident which reportedly began at 7 AM eastern-time appeared to be eventually resolved. Ping! Zine Web Tech Magazine reported that viewing the health dashboard at 11:30 AM eastern-standard time showed all services to be performing normally.

Meanwhile, Amazon Web Services has faced considerable downtime in the past as well. In early July, a storm knocked power off at the company’s North Virginia data center. That incident lead to downtime of services relying on the solution including Instagram, Pinterest and Netflix.

The report from Data Center Knowledge noted that Microsoft’s key European data centers are in areas including Amsterdam and Dublin.